Editor's note: The author of this article is orchid, who is a close friend of the author of this site, LCC. In 2006, he entered Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications to pursue an undergraduate degree. During his freshman year, he started a business with LCC and ran a university group buying club - Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Zipin Club, and later established a company. The society has been active in several universities such as Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Beijing University of Technology. After a conversation between orchid, LCC, and Aya Tuan operations manager Leedd, orchid decided to write this article to talk about the future of group buying websites.
Before reading this article, please think about it: Is there a group buying website that sells products you are interested in every day (or most of the time)?
Group buying websites are very popular recently, and they are popping up everywhere. The strength and quality of the websites are also uneven, but whether they have backgrounds and backends such as Meituan, QQ Group, Nuomi.com, 58 City Group, or all kinds of Small group buying sites all have one problem - chaos. People who look at it are like a mess of flowers, and their eyes are gradually fascinated, and they can’t understand it when they dive in.
What can’t be understood? I can’t understand what these websites are for. Isn't it just group buying? Selling things to make money and gain popularity. Which one is better? Which one is better? Which one is more profitable? Which one is more popular? I think this is a no-brainer. Everyone is out here just for money, but can you make a pot of gold from this? , how to make money is worth studying.
Nowadays, most group buying websites just follow the trend. They give a name, buy a domain name, set up a server, beautify the page, throw in a product every day, and then open the business. If you spend more money, they go around the country, open a few branches, and acquire mergers and acquisitions. A few local websites - I think this is a done deal, so I say that everyone is still confused and doesn't know what they are doing.
That’s not how business works. You have to think about why these websites are popular? How old is this market? Where is your core competitiveness and how can you maintain it? How can you compete with so many group buying websites, big and small? What is your product? Where does the money come from? earn?
These are all questions. Only by truly understanding these issues and studying them thoroughly can we get a share of this market—or dominate the world. What I am going to say below can be summed up in two words - "brand". If you do well with these two words, you will be invincible in the fierce market competition.
In essence, group buying websites have neither core technology nor core products. They are all making wedding dresses for others. So, they rely on "brand", which is a circulation brand and consumer brand for consumers. For content providers, it is a media brand and channel brand. Therefore, brand positioning and construction are the core of the work of a group buying website. From the name, domain name to products and markets, everything should be closely centered around the brand.
The core of establishing a brand is positioning: positioning the consumer group and positioning the product industry. Correct positioning can maximize profits and minimize competition.
A good friend of mine recently quit his job to run a group buying website. I asked him what the positioning of your website is, and he probably answered me this way: "You provide the most value around your clothing, food, housing and behavior. "I said that this positioning is not good. The brand should be precise and niche. In fact, in the end you will find that a giant brand is nothing. This is not what I said, but O. Gewei said.
Therefore, your group buying brand must be accurate, accurate to the industry, accurate to the consumer group, accurate to the region, and even accurate to the product type - only in this way will consumers remember you, understand you, care about you, support you, and finally More and more people are willing to let you take money out of their pockets when buying your things.
There is a serious misunderstanding here - you are not clear about your positioning. Today you will see that the movie tickets are selling well, tomorrow you will see that the restaurant is popular, and the day after tomorrow you will think that cosmetics are profitable. In the end, users of your website will not know who you are. It sells something, so I will simply label you as "a featureless group buying website, no different from others", and then I will pass by it every week or two when I think of it, and the e-mail advertisements are often pushed every day. Being classified as spam, and finally finding out that if you treat the product as the only core competitiveness that is not very easy to use, in fact, your website is not far away from death.
Therefore, positioning is required. There are good and bad products, some profitable and some not profitable, some with high demand and some with low demand, so how do you make a choice? I have observed that the current group buying is concentrated in the following industries: catering, entertainment and leisure, cosmetics, Daily necessities, fast moving consumer goods. In addition, I added sports products, luxury accessories, and gift products with Chinese characteristics, etc., and used some rough indicators such as gross profit margin, consumer groups, market space, consumption channels, market value, etc. to make a more intuitive comparison. Yes, I believe we can see some patterns from it.
The above is positioning based on products, but it can also be positioned based on groups of people, such as:
In addition, it can also be divided by factors such as gender, region, income, social class, occupation, etc. In this way, we have expanded the market and segmented it vertically.
It is not difficult to see from the above table that some websites have gone into some misunderstandings, such as selling cosmetics, daily necessities, fast-moving consumer goods, etc., while some industries have great development potential and market prospects, such as luxury jewelry, gifts, and sports products. , elderly products, etc.
Some people may say, I only have this website, there are so many industries and so many products that I can’t refine, so I’d better continue to make one group every day. So next, what I want to talk about is the method.
The copying costs, technology costs and maintenance costs of group buying websites are actually very low, close to zero - for relatively powerful companies. Therefore, most of the main operating expenses occur in personnel and marketing. So why can't we make full use of existing resources and use a multi-brand strategy to expand at multiple levels - not just geographically.
For example, opening one or even multiple vertical group buying websites in each industry. The advantages of this method are:
You can use relatively small marginal costs to significantly increase sales, rather than just trying your luck with one product every day;
It can form a representative brand, thereby increasing user stickiness and awareness;
You can use wolf pack tactics to compress your competitors' market space and squeeze them out of the market.
Therefore, brands should be used to directly capture consumers and form competition barriers in the market - just like what JD.com has done. Therefore, the competition between group buying websites in the future will not only be a competition between products and marketing, but also a competition between brands.
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